Saturday, September 9, 2017

A short biography of Mario Sironi. by Elena Pontiggia (translated and edited by Leonardo Pavese). Posted by permission from the Associazione Mario Sironi“My greatest pleasure has always been to deal with
matters of art; and I spent countless hours at my table when other people my
age had fun. This passion was so strong in me, and art seemed such a great
thing to me, sublime and unreachable, that I had always considered it an
immense deity of which, unfortunately, to me mere mortal was only conceded to
breathe the perfume.” This is what Mario Sironi, in 1903, at the age of
eighteen, wrote to his cousin Torquato.

Sironi was born in 1885 in Sassari, on
the island of Sardinia, where his father worked at the time, but he was brought
up in Rome, not far from Villa Borghese.

“He considered himself a Roman, more than anything
else; and of the Roman he also had the accent.” That is how Amedeo, Margherita Sarfatti's son, who spent much time with Sironi, remembered him.

In 1902 Sironi had enrolled in engineering school, but
just the following year he was struck by an attack of depression, the first
symptom of an existential malaise which would accompany him throughout his
entire life.

Amedeo Sarfatti said: “He was an introverted man, full
of complexes. Although, I believe, he was very well aware of his worth, and
surely convinced of his artistic and aesthetic values, he was strangely
disparaging, at least apparently, towards his work of which he never seemed
satisfied.”

Mario Sironi Self-portrait

Encouraged by the approval of the old sculptor Ximenes
and by the divisionist painter Discovolo, Sironi quit college and dedicated
himself fully to painting, and began to frequent the studio of the painter
Giacomo Balla. In Balla’s studio he would eventually meet the painters Severini
and Umberto Boccioni who, after a few initial misunderstandings, would become
his dearest friend in his young age.

In 1905 Sironi began to make and publish
illustrations, painting three covers for “L’Avanti della Domenica”, the
Sunday issue of the (Socialist) newspaper L’Avanti.

His paintings, at the time (for example: Madre che
cuce, Sewing Mother, of 1905-1906) were characterized by a filament-like
brush stroke which was reminiscent of Divisionism, but already expressed
Sironi’s plastic and architectonic vocation.

Umberto Boccioni's letters and journals tell us about
Sironi’s recurrent depressive crises, which caused the painter to shut himself
at home, avoiding everybody and concentrating obsessively on drawing. But they
also reveal to us Sironi’s deep love for the classics, just at the time when
the Futurist manifestos were inciting to the destruction of museums.

In August 1910, Boccioni complained that “Sironi
keeps a house full of gypsum models, and copies a Greek head from every
direction, 20 or 25 times!!! Obviously, he disapproves of us”.

It was not until 1913 that Sironi, inspired by
Boccioni’s work, finally approached Futurism. He wrote to Boccioni: “After
having matured on your art, and the art of you all, I fell in love with it,
especially with yours.”

Nevertheless, Sironi would interpret Futurism from the
point of view of his incessant research about volumes, and he would always
paint Dynamic Volumes (quoting the title of one of his paintings), the
movement of which never reaches the point of breaking down the structure of the
figures.

Sironi’s activity within Boccioni’s artistic movement
was very intense: in 1914 he was present at the “Libera Esposizione Futurista,”
at the Sprovieri’s gallery in Rome; and he also participated in a recitation of
freeform poetry.

The following year, Sironi moved to Milan for a short
period, and there collaborated with his illustrations to the magazine “Gli
Avvenimenti” (The Current Events), a publication which was close to
Futurism, and he became part of the managing nucleus of that group.

“Sironi’s not only a very nice man, of a very generous
and upright character, but he is also, and especially, a true Futurist, in the
real meaning of the word, who now has joined deeply, and with great originality,
the research into sculptural dynamism. He has taken Soffici’s place with an
intellect that is at least one hundred times superior.” That was Tommaso
Marinetti’s opinion of Mario Sironi.

In 1915, at the outbreak of First World War in Italy,
Sironi joined the Battaglione Volontario Ciclisti (The Volunteer
Bicycle-Mounted Battalion), to which all the other Futurists belonged:
Boccioni, Marinetti, Sant’Elia (who was killed in the war), Funi, Russolo and
others; and in 1916 he co-signed the Futurist manifesto: L’orgoglio Italiano
(The Italian Pride).

Sant'Elia, Boccioni and Marinetti

The first critical reviews of his work appeared in the
same year. The first one was written by Boccioni, who described Sironi’s
drawings as “an exceptionally powerful and original manifestation of the
artistic illustration.” The second was by Margherita Sarfatti, who emphasized
Sironi’s “art of extreme synthesis and simplification...the stylization, from
real life, through the use of great and strong angular masses of light and
shade, white and black, which sometime reach very powerful effects.”

Meanwhile, however, his work was beginning to be
pervaded by metaphysical influences. In July 1919, after being discharged from
the Army, he held his first personal show at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia where he
displayed, alongside some of his futurist paintings, examples of work with a
clear metaphysical ascendancy.

It was not an accident that Mario Broglio (1891-1948),who was an Italian artist, art critic and publisher, while
stigmatizing the persistence of the Futurist elements, could not help but
notice in a few paintings “a materialization full of wonderment and
enchantment; a sort of contemplative repose”, and spoke also of “images which
tend to bring us outside time and space, where an archaic soul seems to have
brought to life simple and severe bodies, like in a dream.”

In July of that year, Sironi wed Matilde Fabbrini,
with whom he had been engaged since 1915. However, in September he left for
Milan without his wife, because he couldn’t afford to bring her along. He wrote to
Matilde: “Milan buzzes all about, like the engines of that airship we used to
listen to. What can this wheeling and dealing town give to me besides a loathing
for her and the need to defend myself against its very power? Nevertheless,
it’s much better than Rome, which is nothing but a deplorable dream.”

It was during this period, probably because he was
affected and influenced by the city’s environment, that he began to create his
unmistakable urban landscapes.

Meanwhile, he had grown closer to the Fascist
movement. Marinetti remembers that, already by October 1919, Sironi was among
those who participated in the meetings of the Fascio of Milan. His adherence to
the fascist movement, which Sironi later expressed in great works with an
ideological but never propagandistic content, has vitiated the opinions of many
about his art, much more so than in the case of other artists of that time.

As an example, the architect Giuseppe
Terragni was not less of a fascist than Sironi, but the studies of his work have
not centered in a preponderant way on his political convictions, as it happened
instead with the literature about Sironi.

Furthermore, the numerous studies about the
subject don’t always make an effort to comprehend fully what Fascism meant to
Mario Sironi, as Agnoldomenico Pica, for example, advised the art critics to do.
Emily Braun wrote: “As a diehard supporter of Sironi, even after the
war, Pica frankly admitted that Sironi had been a fascist, as he himself had
been, and, he said, still was. “But,” Pica admonished her, “you should
understand what our Fascism was.”

To Sironi, as it can be deduced from his writings,
Fascism meant essentially two things: the first was the dream of a renaissance of
Italy, and therefore of Italian art; the second, as we will see better later,
it was the desire of “moving towards the people,” to use Mussolini’s own
expression, that is, in the field of visual expression, the dream of an art
which wasn’t meant for the salons, or for rich collectors, but for the squares and
the walls of public buildings, and therefore for everybody.

When, in 1944, the sculptor Arturo Martini (1889-1947) said that Sironi “
believed to be a Fascist, but his was the nearly abyssal soul of a Bolshevik,”
he just meant to emphasize the sense of Sironi’s fascism, which was always a
fascism “of the left” (to use a cliché which is not without ambiguity) or, in
any case a fascism with a “social” vocation.

We can compare this statement by
Martini to what Sironi’s wife Matilde said about her husband: “He should be
called an anarchist! As far as I’m concerned, I’d call him a “communist,”
although of a later time variety...But he was for Mussolini, that’s for sure.”

In January of 1920, together with Funi, Dudreville and
Russolo Sironi signed The Futurist Manifesto. Against all the revivals in
painting, which, notwithstanding the title, already contained many of the
proposals of the future artistic movement “Novecento Italiano.”

In March of the same year he participated in a group
exhibition, in the newly established Galleria Arte, where he exhibited his
urban landscapes for the first time. The first of the three urban landscapes to be documented with
certainty was: Paesaggio urbano con camion (Urban Landscape with Truck,
painted in 1920).

This series of paintings represents one of the high
points of the art of Sironi, nevertheless it’s also one of the themes which
were least understood by the more recent critics.

In this regard, it is helpful to review the
interpretation that Margherita Sarfatti gave of these paintings: an interpretation
born from her daily conversations with Sironi, and with which the painter
identified, in view of his on-going intellectual fellowship with the writer.

The basic elements, which Sarfatti isolates in
Sironi’s urban landscapes, are two: the tragic element, and what she calls,
with a Nietzchean and D’Annunzio-like expression, the “Glorification.” There’s
no need to dwell on the first point: the tragic aspect of Sironi’s paintings is
evident: the outskirts of the town he paints don’t know niceties, prettiness or
embellishment. Only the implacable arrangement of volumes. They are a metaphor
of existence: the neighborhoods are not tough, life is.

Nevertheless, Sironi infused strength and grandiosity
in these tragic elements. The powerful structure of the buildings, which
resemble secular cathedrals, expresses a constructive energy, which stands in
contrast with the severity of the image; an energy which, on one hand, is
evidence of the persistence of matter and on the other hand the sign of a
rediscovered ability to construct the forms. It is actually, in the widest
sense of the expression, the very symbol of construction, meant as a
“categorical imperative,” or moral duty.

At that time though, Sironi was mainly known as an
illustrator. During the 1920-21 period, especially on the magazine “Industrie
Italiane Illustrate”, he published on average a drawing a week. It was a
commitment with an overwhelming rhythm, about which Sironi complained to his
wife: “I work and work; like I was drilling my brain”.

Furthermore, in August of 1921 Sironi began collaborating
with the “Popolo d’Italia”, the daily newspaper founded by Benito
Mussolini himself, a co-operation which will last uninterrupted until October
of 1942.

During the early 1920’s, his drawings appeared on the
newspaper very frequently, at times almost daily; and his illustrations
constitute a dramatic and sarcastic commentary on the political events of the
time.

As he himself remembered: “We worked with feverish fervor.
Many times, the ideas and the subjects for the illustrations were given to me
by Mussolini himself. I had to deliver the drawings by nine o’clock in the
morning, and many times to finish them it took all night.”

During the same year (1921), Matilde was finally able
to join him in Milan. They were frequent guests at the Sarfatti’s house at
Cavallasca, on Lake Como, and their first daughter, Aglae, was born in 1921.

Margherita Sarfatti as portrayed by Sironi

In December of 1922, Sironi, with Bucci, Dudreville,
Funi, Malerba, Marussig and Oppi founded “Novecento Italiano”, an artistic
movement inspired by Margherita Sarfatti, which proposed the idea of a “Modern
Classicism”, that is, a classic form of painting, devoid of the pictorial
effects of the 19th century and sifted through a purist filter. The group
exhibited for the first time at the Galleria Pesaro, in March of 1923.

In 1924 Sironi participated to the Venice Biennale
with the “Novecento” group, who had rechristened themselves the “Six Painters
of the Novecento,” due to the absence of Ubaldo Oppi.

At the Biennale Sironi, whose pictures unfortunately
went almost un-noticed, showed four paintings centered on the human figure,
among which L’architetto (The Architect) and L’allieva (The
Student), which remain among his greatest works of art.

L'allieva

Still in 1924, he created the scenes and the costumes
for Aristophanes’ The Knights, beginning his research work into theatre,
which will continue into the following decades.

Sironi was, by far, the most representative artistic figure
in the “Novecento” movement. He became a member of the Board of Directors as
early as 1925 and he exhibited his work in the national and international group
expositions; but his absence from the group exhibition of 1927 called:
“Quindici artisti del Novecento” (Fifteen artists of the Novecento Movement) in
Milan, at the Scopinich gallery, was the first hint of his dissatisfaction with
the “system” of art, the galleries and the market circuit.

The desire to return to mural painting was growing in
him: it was a wish that Sironi had been cherished for a long time, (and there’s
evidence of that even in the articles by Sarfatti, since 1919). It was a desire
that had been acquiring a deeper and deeper theoretical awareness.

In the meanwhile (in fact since 1927), Sironi had also
begun writing as an art critic for the “Popolo d’Italia”.

Mario Sironi

Around the year 1930 Sironi met Mimì Costa, to whom,
through alternate vicissitudes, he will remain bound for the rest of his life.In 1932 he separated from his wife Matilde, although the problematic family
situation would not prevent him to prove himself a very tender and attentive
father to his daughters Aglae and Rossana. (Rossana had been born to the
Sironi’s in 1929); and 1930 was also the year in which the first monographic
book about him, authored by Giovanni Scheiwiller, was published. It must be
said, incidentally, that Sironi in this case revealed a total indifference for
the dating of his paintings; the same attitude that he would always demonstrate
towards the accuracy of his biographical data. “I was born in Sassari
(Sardinia) in the past century…” is the laconic biography which Sironi used to
pen about himself.

In 1931 Sironi was commissioned to build the
stained-glass window entitled La Carta del Lavoro (The Charter of
Workers) for the Ministry of Corporations in Rome, which he will complete in
1932; and two great canvases for the Palace of the Postal Service in the city
of Bergamo entitled: Lavoro nei Campi or L’Agricoltura (The Work
in the Fields or Agriculture) and Lavoro in Città or L’Architettura (Work
in the City or Architecture).

From this moment on, Sironi will devote himself mainly
to great decorative works, disregarding painting on the easel, which he had
come to consider, in his own words: “a limited and insufficient art form.” For him,
in fact, wall painting was not simply a technique, but a radically different
way to think about art (ancient and classic at the same time, but also novel
and authentically fascist, in the sense that, as he himself said: “it was the
“social art” par excellence”).

But why should a mural painting be more valuable than
a canvas? Sironi believed there were three basic reasons. To begin with, a
large public wall decoration embodied an egalitarian utopia, because it
couldn’t be privately owned, and it could be found in the streets, in the
workplaces or at the post office. Furthermore, in this way the importance of
the galleries and the market was reduced, because a wall couldn’t be bought or
sold easily, nor could it be exhibited, unless in an ephemeral form, therefore
stimulating the commissioning of works of art by the state. Lastly, mural painting would have
inspired the artists to tackle solemn and grand themes (because it would have
been impossible to paint, for example, an apple near a pear under, let’s say,
the Arch of Titus) and to develop a new concept of space, to bypass the
intimism and the idea of art centered around the psychology and the feelings of
the artist.

Nevertheless, and this is the main point, wall
painting should not fall in the trap of placing emphasis on content over form,
or degenerate into propaganda. Sironi dreamt of an art that was in keeping with
the spirit of the fascist revolution, but he was aware that that depended
solely on style and not on the subject of the painting; contrary to what was
happening, for instance, with (Soviet) socialist realism, as he himself pointed
out: “Rather than through the subject (the communist idea), it is through the
suggestions of the environment and through style that art will be able to shape
anew the popular soul…”

Italy between the Arts and the Sciences

For the entire decade, Sironi (among the innumerable things
at which he worked at an unbelievable rhythm) toiled after a long succession of
monumental works, in which he chose a multi-centric composition, very often
divided into quadrants and ruled by pre-Renaissance perspective and
organization of space. Even in his few easel paintings of this period (which
were often inspired by the ideas of labor, the family and the landscape, in the
sense of primordial and timeless concepts), the figures assume titanic
proportions, reminiscent of the statues of antiquity, which have the potential
grandiosity of mural paintings.

It is impossible to list here all the works to which
Sironi gave his contribution between 1932 and 1939, because they truly are
innumerable, (for a complete listing, please refer to Sironi’s biography at the Associazione Mario Sironi's website). During this period Sironi invited all the best Italian
artists to execute monumental decorations. He himself sculpted the great mural
Il Lavoro (Labor), besides several other sculptures. It was also in this
occasion that the anti-Novecento controversy resumed. The polemic had started
actually in 1931-32 and it was encouraged especially by Roberto Farinacci, from
his paper “Il Regime Fascista.”

Sironi was the object of violent attacks and he
defended with passionate articles the line of thinking of the “Novecento”
movement. Contrary to what is often stated though, Sironi was not forced to
resign from the daily “Il Popolo d’Italia”
(and in fact he continued to contribute to the newspaper’s monthly supplement “Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia”
(The Illustrated Magazine of the Popolo d’Italia); nor he ever lost Mussolini’s
personal appreciation. The anecdote relayed by Ojetti, who said that the
dictator, in 1933, criticized the “big hands” and the “big feet,” in
Sironi’s drawings, finally blurting out: “Sironi’s an idiot” is dubiously
trustworthy and, in any case, it should be put back into perspective.Mussolini, as late as in the years of the Republic of Salò, wrote: “The art of
Sironi was the background against which I built my revolution.” Even Sironi’s
failure to participate in the 1934 Venice Biennale, which has been often
attributed to his controversy with Farinacci, had different causes, as we will
examine later.

In 1939 Sironi also planned the execution of the
sculptures for the Danteum (an envisioned, but never built monument to
Dante Alighieri), designed by the design group directed by Giuseppe Terragni;
and between 1939 and 1942 he collaborated again with Giovanni Muzio to the completion of
the Palace of the Popolo d’Italia, executing the decorations for the facade and
for a few internal spaces, contributing also to the architectural design.

It was a commitment without respite, with unforgiving
deadlines that compromised even his health but did not completely satisfy his
creative tension, which was frustrated not only by the envy of his colleagues
but also by the incomprehension of the critics.

About the 1937 bas-reliefs for Paris, for example, Sironi
wrote:

“Mine is a modest effort; just a feeble germ of what
my contribution could be if the aforementioned bullies were bumped off, as they
deserve and they are not, instead of being alive.”

In the course of that
decade, Sironi had radically cut down his participation to the art exhibits,
although he held two important personal shows at the Galleria Milano in 1931
and 1934. A symptom of his disinterest was a little known episode: Sironi was
invited to the 1934 Venice Biennale. He had pledged to show never-seen-before
work, but he failed to send any painting, ignoring the ever-more-frantic
telegrams from the curator of the exhibit, Maraini, who was urging him, halfway
between begging and threatening him, and who, five days before the final coat
of paint, declared himself “sorry to have to dispose differently of the space
that had been reserved for you until now.”

By that time, the war was raging. Notwithstanding the
fact that Sironi had guessed early on how the war would end, (in November of
1942, he had written to Mussolini himself: “May God save You, and with You all
of us.”) he gave his support to the Italian Social Republic, following the
evolution of the events with increasing anguish.

On a sheet of paper, written in 1944-1945, that was
found in his studio, we read: “Every day is an enormous effort to go on, to
resist with this heart crushed by the enormous fatigue to exist...There is
nobody here close to me; just more atrocious loneliness, as always...In some
moments, I still delude myself. Then the horrid and gloomy wind starts blowing
anew...Everything fell apart in the last few months, everything. There’s
nothing left but rubbles and fear.”

And in a 1945 or 1946 letter he wrote: “But what came
later was even more lugubrious...I saw things that even my bitter philosophy
wouldn’t have allowed me to imagine. I saw the atrocity of life and the
bestiality of human nature.”

To Sironi, who didn’t seek refuge (like many others
did), in last hour changes of allegiance, the end of the regime was a
devastating moment; and in fact it wasn’t just emotional suffering, because on
the 25th of April (the day of the fall of Fascism) he also ran the risk to be
executed.

Several versions of this dramatic episode have
circulated. Some are clearly unbelievable, like the Marco Valsecchi’s account, who
claimed Sironi went out in the street in Milan, amidst the shooting, and walked
for hours, with his little she-dog, until he reached Lake Como, which is almost
50 kilometers away. (Valsecchi, 1913-1980, was an Italian art critic, professor and author.)

In reality, as witnessed by the writer Gianni Rodari, Sironi, with his dog on a leash, took indeed the road to Como, but he was
stopped at a roadblock by a group of Resistance fighters. He would have been
shot on the spot if Rodari, who belonged to the partisan brigade, hadn’t
recognized him. “I don’t know if I should be proud of it,” Gianni Rodari said.
“I signed his safe-conduct pass, in the name of Art.”

There’s no record that Sironi ever endured any
political “purging” process, notwithstanding the violent climate of the period
immediately following the war. However, on June 15, 1945, on the paper “Gli
Insorti”, (the Rebels), one Albano Rossi published Sironi’s La Famiglia, demanding imperiously the
elimination of all the artists of the “Novecento.”

The Family

His desperate bitterness for the collapse of his civic
and political hopes was compounded by the grief for the suicide of his daughter
Rossana, who took her own life in 1949, at the age of nineteen. Nevertheless, he
never stopped working; although very often, in his paintings, a fragmentation
of shapes and a slackening of composition syntax replaced the powerful energy
of the construction of his early works. It’s not by accident that one of his
last pictorial series was dedicated to The Apocalypse.

During the post-war years, he refused polemically to
participate to the Venice Biennale, but he kept showing his work throughout
Italy (at the 1951 Milan’s Triennale and at the 1955 Rome Quadriennale) and
abroad, in an itinerant exhibit with Marino Marini in the U.S.A., in 1953.

The monographic book Mario Sironi Pittore, by
his old friend Agnoldomenico Pica, which to this day remains the most important
publication dedicated to Sironi, was published in 1955.

In 1956 Sironi was elected Member of the Academy of
San Luca: an award which he received with scorn. “A farce,” he wrote to his
brother.

In the meanwhile his health had been deteriorating,
also for the manifestation of a form of progressive arthritis. In August of
1961, while his partner Mimì was abroad, Sironi was taken to a hospital in
Milan with pneumonia. He died a few days later, on August 13.

Some time before that, he had written
to Luigi Gobbi, his barber and one of his few confidants: “I can’t say anything
about myself. In the vegetable garden, right in front, there’s a little pile of
trash and it looks to me like my life, my heart, my hopes...Let’s hope that,
after so many storms, so many tempests and so much bestial suffering...we’ll
reach a harbor where we’ll find peace and silence for our miserable heart.”

Elena Pontiggia is an Italian art historian and author. She teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, and writes about art for several newspapers and publications.Your comments will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Friday, September 8, 2017

At the
end of 1922, with Benito Mussolini firmly seated as President of the Council of
Ministers (the executive branch of the Italian government), Margherita Sarfatti
began to delineate her cultural project in a modernist sense. With Mussolini’s
permission, Sarfatti founded the artistic movement Novecento Italiano (the Italian 20th century) with the
goal of creating an entirely new Italian art that would reinvent the Italian
tradition from Roman to medieval art, merging it with modernity and therefore
becoming the figurative transposition of fascist ideology.

The
movement was sparked one October night in 1922, shortly before the fascist
March on Rome, when Sarfatti attended a meeting at the Pesaro art gallery in
Milan. Seven of her favorite artists were present, namely, Anselmo Bucci,
Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, Ubaldo
Oppi, and Mario Sironi. [2]

The purpose of
the meeting was to formalize the formation of the artistic group that had been
conceived and wished-for by the “Red Virgin” herself. [3] Margherita Sarfatti became the unofficial advertising
agent of the new group, in charge of publicity and critical reviews.

During a second meeting that was entirely devoted to
finding a name for the group, Anselmo Bucci proposes the name “I Candelabri”
(the Menorahs), in view of the fact that the group had seven members. But
Sarfatti and Pesaro were Jewish and considered Bucci’s choice a risky one that
could cause unfavorable comments from the public. Bucci then floated a second
proposal that the movement be named for the century in which it operated: Novecento (The Nineteen-Hundreds), and Novecento it became.[4]These are the years during which Margherita Sarfatti
also edited the publications “Gerarchia” and “Il Popolo d’Italia,” and was also responsible for the foreign press service
of the future Italian Duce. She did it all from Milan, to be close to her
family.

During
those early meetings of the organizing phase of Novecento, Sarfatti was careful to avoid any explicit reference to
the current political situation and to Fascism, even though such references
would have pleased the ultra-fascist Mario Sironi, who was the official
illustrator of “Il Popolo d’Italia” and “Gerarchia,” and the painter Achille
Funi, one of the very early supporters of the Fasci di Combattimento” (the
Fighting Fasces organization). The two artists, together with Carlo Carrà,
saluted euphorically the appointment of Benito Mussolini to the head of the
government, the only man they considered capable to reaffirm the Italian
supremacy in the arts over the rest of the world.[5]

When, in March of 1920, Novecento decided to hold the first
group exhibition, Margherita convinced the Duce to inaugurate the event. On
that occasion, Mussolini gave a short speech, which was probably written by
Sarfatti herself. He thundered:

“It is
impossible to rule ignoring the arts and the artists. Art is an essential
manifestation of the human spirit; it began with the history of humanity, and
it will follow humanity to the end. And in a country like Italy, a government
that did not care about art and artists would be deficient.

“I
declare that the idea of anything that could even resemble a state art is very
far from me. Art pertains to the sphere of the individual and the state has
only one duty: to avoid impeding the arts, to ensure humane living conditions
for the artists and to encourage them from a national and artistic point of
view. I really care to point out that the government that I preside over is a
sincere friend of the arts and of the artists.”[6]

It is very likely that Mussolini did not like the
nudes, the portraits, the landscapes, the still-life paintings and the pictures
of everyday objects painted by the artists of Novecento. But it is a fact that he appreciated the return to
“order,” after all the Futurist clangor and the Dadaist nonsense.[7]

Throughout
the 1920’s, Margherita Sarfatti forcefully denounced the various attempts to
imprint a Fascist mark on popular culture and the arts. In one of her articles,
written to commemorate the first anniversary of the March on Rome, she declared
in a lapidary tone that Fascism inspired “bad taste,” and that the only valid
works were the bust of Mussolini created by Adolfo Wildt and Sironi’s satirical
political cartoons.

Mussolini obtorto
collo seemed to concur with her and, for that reason, he allowed Margherita
to be his advisor in matters of aesthetics. It is not an accident that in 1924,
at the national conference of the artistic organizations, Mussolini pointed out
that, in his opinion, the concepts of Italy and art cannot be separated.
Moreover, and these were his exact words, “For centuries art was our very own
Fatherland”.[8]

Novecento achieved its first great public recognition in 1924,
when the members received the official invitation to participate as a group in
the Biennale of Venice. That would be the first time ever that an organized
group exhibited at the Biennale. [9]

On April 26th, during Education Secretary Giovanni
Gentile’s welcome speech to the King at the Biennale inauguration ceremony, a
frowning and dark-in-the-face Filippo Marinetti yelled, “Down with decrepit
Venice!”[10]

That was Marinetti’s way of protesting the exclusion of
the Futurists from the Biennale.
After all, many of the members of the Novecento group had come from Marinetti’s
movement, and that hurt. But what hurt even more was that Futurism had not become (and never would become) Fascism’s official
art form, and by that time it was already becoming a marginal artistic movement
to the advantage of Novecento. [11]

But Novecento was already coming apart.
Regardless the recognition that the group had achieved thanks to the Biennale,
Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville, Gian Emilio Malerba, and Lino Pesaro, who
were probably hostile to Margherita Sarfatti, decided to leave the group.
Although Margherita’s friends, like Sironi, Funi and Pietro Marussig remained,
the secession of the other members resulted in the dissolution of Novecento. [12]

Sironi. Natura morta antifascista

Sarfatti’s artistic salon between Fascism
and Anti-Fascism.

When peacetime came after the end of WWI, Margherita
Sarfatti had employed two powerful cultural “levers” to secure a role for
herself in Italian politics and the arts. These instruments were her personal
column in the daily “Il Popolo d’Italia” and her salon. It was in her salon
that, during her Wednesday meetings, she welcomed new guests and sealed new
alliances. The poets Ada Negri and Alfredo Panzini were old acquaintances. Her
new friends were Massimo Bontempelli, the illustrious professor Dr. Giuseppe
Antonio Borghese, and the orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini.[13] Soon, Sarfatti
added to her tools her new political magazine “Ardita,” a publication launched by her and by Benito Mussolini, the
future Duce. The title “Ardita,” from
Arditi, the name of the WWI Italian Royal Army’s assault troops, was chosen by
the Red Virgin herself to honor not only her son Roberto (killed in action),
but also the former Arditi who were now backing Mussolini. This monthly
literary magazine owed a lot to the previous 1913-14 publication “Utopia,” and the first issue was
published in March 1919 featuring a short story by Massimo Bontempelli. [14]

In 1929,
twenty-one-year-old writer Alberto Pincherle, better known as Alberto Moravia,
published his first novel, Gli
Indifferenti (The Indifferent Ones). From a sociologic point of view, the
novel was very advanced. It portrayed in scathing prose the alienated and
morally corrupted Italian bourgeoisie. Giuseppe Borgese, positively impressed
by the novelty of Moravia’s work, welcomed it in the pages of the daily
“Corriere della Sera” as a very important literary work. But when Moravia was
introduced to Margherita Sarfatti, she greeted him in an inopportune
and scornful way: “You’re the cousin of that pig, Carlo Rosselli!” She wasn’t
wrong about the degree of kinship (but only about that). Moravia was indeed the cousin of the Rosselli
brothers who would be murdered by Mussolini’s agents in France in 1937.[15]

But many were the antifascists who frequented
Sarfatti’s salon and, in 1929, Margherita met Calabrian writer Corrado Alvaro.
The writer had fought in the Great War as a teen-ager, and later became a
reporter in Rome. In 1925, while he was the editor of the Liberal newspaper “Il Mondo,” Alvaro had signed philosopher
Benedetto Croce’s antifascist manifesto. The immediate effect of this choice
had been Alvaro’s expulsion from the guild of fascist journalists. Margherita
met him in the home of common acquaintances.

“I’d like to see you again,” Margherita told him. “I
receive every Friday.” Alvaro pondered his isolation and the fact that he was
being hounded by Mussolini’s henchmen. He knew that under Margherita’s
protective umbrella he would find a haven. He decided to play the Margherita
card; he began to frequent assiduously her salon and —
so it’s rumored — became her lover. A year later — but this might be just a
coincidence — Alvaro won the Giovanni Agnelli literary prize for his novel Gente d’Aspromonte (People of
Aspromonte). The prize had been instituted by the Turin’s daily newspaper La Stampa and included a £50,000
(Italian Liras) award.

But Alvaro put up with Margherita’s insolence and
capriciousness only until he realized that being her friend had become
counterproductive.[16] There is an amusing anecdote that Corrado Alvaro told
frequently, which says a lot about the tensions between Margherita Sarfatti and
Mussolini’s family. One evening a lady had invited inadvertently and maybe a
little carelessly both Sarfatti and Edda Ciano (Mussolini’s daughter) to her
party. When Edda arrived, everyone huddled around her, except Margherita,
Alvaro and Bontempelli. For that reason, throughout the entire evening everyone
avoided Margherita like the plague. When the time came to leave, Margherita and
Edda met face to face and Sarfatti, with a big smile on her face, exclaimed:
“Good evening, Countess!” while the other woman, after an icy “Buonasera” in
reply, said intentionally and very loudly: “Who’s that woman?”[17] These and other episodes would suggest Corrado Alvaro
that his patroness was no longer able to guarantee his protection; and he would
quietly slip away.[18]

Many other “antifascist” personalities frequented
Margherita’s salon. Some particularly assiduous frequenters, who came all the
way from France, were former French Prime Minister and then Foreign Minister
Louis Barthou, and writers André Malraux, Eugène Marsan, and André Gide. And
even sui generis American “fascists”
were present, such as playwright Sinclair Lewis (whose last great work, It Can’t Happen Here,was a speculative dystopian novel that
told of the election of a fascist to the presidency of the United States) and
the poet Ezra Pound, who would meet Benito Mussolini in 1933. [19]

Finally, her falling out of favor with the fascists
would lead Margherita Sarfatti to a long personal reflection about the “search
for happiness.” With the help of diplomat friends based in Rome, Sarfatti began
to research and appreciate more and more the social experiment of American
President Roosevelt’s New Deal, and
she would increasingly become convinced that that was the new political
frontier and the panacea for every social crisis. In 1934, she visited the
United States. She studied the local situation and, in 1937, she wrote L’America, ricerca della felicità (America,
the search for happiness).

From reading the text, it is clear that among
Margherita’s always fervid political hopes was that Roosevelt’s America had
replaced Mussolini’s utopic regime,[20] to the point that she would request the membership of
the Socialist Party when she returned to Italy after the Second World War.

Ivan Buttignon.

This article appeared on the Italian magazine Il Fondo, edited by Miro Renzaglia. It was translated and published here with their permission.

Ivan Buttignon is an author and a historian who teaches at the University of Trieste.